18 BOY M T 5 GIRL M T 5 FOOT X YBODY who chanced to be flat- boatlng down the Sunday book- review sections lately, poling his way through such nifties as "Bisl11arck: .il New Synthesis," by Dr. Stauffer, or "A Deciduous Girl of Old \Villiams- burgh," by Sara Leal11ington Latrobe, probably wound up the day in a dark- ened room applying vinegar poultices freely to his forehead. It would seem frol11 the publishers' spring lists that the entire l1lel11bership of the .l\merican Medical .i\ssociation had forsworn the art of healing in favor of letters. Possibly because of the general world break- "- down, the fal11ily doctor whose reticence was celebrated in song and story has suddenly caved in and becol11e a gar- rulous old chatterbox, buttonholing the passer-by and babbling your most cher- ished anatol11ical secrets. Since the suc- cess of Dr. Victor Heiser, a veritable freshet of rel11iniscence has been roaring through the bookshops. If turnabout is fair play and a laYl1lan l11ay diagnose his physician's cOl11plaint, the boys who \vrote "The Horse and Buggy Doctor," "Consultation Room," and "Doctor, Here's Your Hat" are down with a thundering case of furor scribenrli. Gone the spatula and the glittering optical l11irror, and in their place the quill pen and the purple patch. If you have been looking for a bargain in second-hand scalpels, this is your golden opportunity. But it looks like a hell of a SUl11mer for invalids. It rel11ained for Dr. Dudley J. Mor- ton of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Colul11bia, however, to in- vest the COl11mon or garden foot with "- glal110ur and el11ploy it as l11aterial for rOl11ance. In "0 h, Doctor! M J' Feet! ," undeniably the l110st plaintive title of the season, Dr. Morton sets your foot tap- ping, if only to convince yourself that it still articulates. Dr. lVlorton has builded better than he knew; the reader beCOl11es so acutely aware of his feet that he spends his day listening with a rather cunning expression to the l11etatarsals meshing in- to gear. My experience has been that although this type of work is not ex- hausting, it pays very badly. Dr. Morton, with a sense of dramat- ic value not COl11111only encountered in orthopedists, opens his narrative explo- sively. Into the office of a Dr. Nelson, shouting "Oh, Doctor! Jly feet!," bursts Mrs. Roberts, an attractive young matron. Conscious of the brusqueness of her words, she adds hastily, "Oh, ,. . . - please forgive me, Dr. Nelson, but l11Y feet burn and ache so I scarcely know what to do." Dr. Nelson soothingly guides her to a chair with "\" ell, you have done the rational thing by cOl11ing to see l11e, for I'm certain I can help you." I suppose the irrational thing for rv'lrs. Roberts would have been to con- sult a blacksmith, but I l11yself would have liked her better for it. As a 11latter of fact, Dr. Morton throughout por- trays Mrs. Roberts as sOl1lething of a hoob, which I suspect is a deep-seated conviction al110ng doctors about their patients. She is scarcely seated when her face expresses "a considerable degree of surprise." "\Vhy, I didn't know you \.\lcre in terested in feet, Doctor." By one of those al11azing coincidences which happen only in fiction, Dr. Nelson turns out to be the ideal party to whom Mrs. Roberts should have brought her feet. He invites her to relate her SYl11ptOl11S. "\Vell, Doctor," Mrs. Roberts replies, "they started to bother l11e about two years ago and since then I've tried al- l110St everything. My closet is so full of shoes I've bought on recol11111enda- tion or seen advertised that l11Y husband laughs at me and suggests I open a store." You will notice that Dr. Mor- ton, not content with delineating Mrs. Roberts as a sÏ111pleton, gratuitously in- sinuates her husband is a red-faced, bull- necked extrovert who taunts his wife vY'ith her malady. SOI11ehow it left l11e with the uncol11fortable feeling that the author had poisoned a well. Try as I would, I kept seeing Mr. Roberts in my l11ind's eye as a sort of Dr. Grimes- by Roylott, a savage tyrant who goes around kicking open doors in Baker Street and bending pokers double. Oddly enough, at this very juncture Dr. Nelson puts on a display of scientific ded uction that would have done credit to Holmes hil11self. Ordering Mrs. Roberts to rel110ve her shoes and stockings and stand directly in front of hil11, he asks his patient, "with hardly l110re than a cursory glance," "Do you have the cal- luses on the soles of your feet treated often?" If Mrs. Roberts was surprised before, she now is reduced to a stupefac- tion worthy of \" atson. "You haven't even looked at the bottOl11 of l11Y feet," she rel11inds the Doctor faintly. The latter, without even a casual yawn or a "Come, what do you say to Paga- nini at t e .li\lbert Hall tonight? ," points out that her second toes are distinctly longer than her great toes. Sil11pering MAY I . 19 9 girlishly, Mrs. Roberts replies, "But I always took that to be an indication of a perfect foot. If you will perl11it a little confession, I have always been secretly proud of l11Y feet-at least, I have been since I noticed that the short great toe is distinctly shown in Grecian sculpture." Dr. Nelson, in that l11ad- dening way doctors have, crushes Mrs. Roberts' pitiful little pride in her feet \vith the rejoinder, "What was ideal for the WOl11en of ancient Greece is de- finitely not ideal for the modern wom- an who wears high-heeled shoes." Of course, old sl11arty-pants Nelson knows what Grecian women wore on their feet; he was there. Everybody rel11em- bers him around the agora, arm in arl11 with Pericles. Oh, you wlne-dark, loud-thundering, many-throated Nel- son, you! \Vell, one thing and another and be- fore you know it Mrs. Roberts is on her way home with orders to stay off her feet and plunge them alternately into hot and cold water, which I could have told her, who know as l11uch about po- diatry as any wide-awake gibbon in the Bronx Park Zoo. T HE next chapter is a colloquy on Mrs. Roberts' feet between the Doctor and his nurse. This could eas- ily be lifted in its entirety and put into a revue. The dialogue is crisp and l11eaty, and Dr. Nelson manages to l11ake quite a fool of the girl with his answers. It \vould have l11ade an effective blackout had they beaten each other with rolled- up newspapers, but there I go carping again. Early next l110rning another pa- tient staggers in, a Mrs. Wells. She, too, is having a very thin tÎ111e with her feet, and the Doctor treats her with the ten- der sYl11pathy of a T orquemada: "He then proceeded to test the l110vements of all the joints of the foot and ankle, noting that Mrs. Wells was able, when her knees were held straight, to bend her feet upward only slightly beyond a right angle with her legs. [That is, without applying the boot.] Finally he pressed gently but deeply into the centre of her instep. She winced and drew her foot back, Just as Mrs. Roberts had done the day before." The upshot of this diablerie is one of those superb bits of patient-baiting that doctors excel at: "H is patient.. . could no longer sup- press her eager curiosity. 'Doctor,' she asked, 'are l11Y arches fallen?' 'No,' he replied, 'they aren't-any 1110re than a person with eye-strain is blind.' " In her place I would have given the Doctor a jah in the sweetbreads with my shiv and